The Trouble with Love

by Lauren Layne

  She blinked. “What do you mean?”

  His smile was kind. “Just that I figure at some point, some guy must have been able to make you smile. And I always wondered if it was the same guy that made you stop.”

  Chapter 11

  “You might have mentioned that your ‘casual dinner thing’ was actually a planned dinner party for eight,” Emma said as she made her way around Julie’s dining table, placing salad plates into position.

  “I didn’t mention it?” Julie called, glancing up from where she was arranging an antipasto platter at the kitchen counter.

  “Nope,” Emma said, setting down the last plate. “Must have slipped your mind.”

  “Must have!” Julie said, popping an olive in her mouth and grinning.

  Emma just shook her head. “Don’t even. I’m sure that pretty smile works just fine on Mitchell here, but I remain unmoved.”

  “Does this smile work on you, honey?” Julie said, turning to face her fiancé, who was doing something fancy with an onion at the cutting board.

  He glanced over. “Works better when you’re naked, but this isn’t so bad.”

  “Is that so?” Julie said, turning to give Mitchell her full attention.

  Emma watched the couple’s exchanged gazes go from playful to heated in mere seconds and rolled her eyes. “Nope. No way. Clothes stay on. Also, why am I the only one on time?”

  Emma was pretty sure she knew the answer to her own question. She would not be even a little bit surprised to know that Grace/Jake and Riley/Sam had gotten held up by the very same thing simmering between Julie and Mitchell. Sex.

  Grace and Jake were in some sort of newlywed bubble of hormones, and as for Sam and Riley . . . well, they had about ten years of sexual tension to make up for. Something Riley liked to remind them all of.

  Often.

  As for the eighth member of the dinner party . . .

  Emma didn’t care one bit whether he was held up by sex or constipation or lack of taxis.

  Except it wouldn’t be the last one. Because Cassidy, like Emma, lived within walking distance of Julie and Mitchell.

  Cassidy, who was to be the only other single at this damn dinner party.

  “Don’t look so pissy,” Julie said around a piece of cheese, having finally turned her come-hither eyes away from Mitchell. “The group of us haven’t done dinner together in forever, and this is the first time both you and Alex have been single in a few months. . . .”

  “Wait, what’s that have to do with anything?” Emma asked. “I’ve made it quite clear—”

  “That you don’t mind seeing Cassidy with other women. Blah, blah, we know. And he gives us the same lecture about you. But,” Julie said, nipping another piece of cheese, “it’s not about you two.”

  Emma lifted an eyebrow. “Explain.”

  “It’s about the ever-revolving rotation of your guys’ significant others,” Julie explained.

  “Meaning?” Emma helped herself to a glass of wine on the sideboard.

  “Meaning, that nobody wants to sit across from the person their current significant other almost married. So it’s hard to have you both over at the same time, you know?”

  Emma sat on the bar stool at the counter and stole a piece of salami off Julie’s platter. “So, what, you just take turns inviting us over?”

  “When one of you is in a relationship, yeah.”

  “I haven’t been in a relationship for, like, three months,” Emma said.

  “Right,” Julie said, holding out her hand and wiggling her fingers for Emma’s wine glass. “But Cassidy has.”

  Emma scowled. “If you want me to share my wine, that little reminder is so not the way to make it happen.”

  “Aha!” Julie said, waving a finger in Emma’s face. “So you do care that he was seeing someone.”

  Mitchell cleared his throat. “Julie. We talked about this. Remember that whole mind your own business thing?”

  Julie sighed and went to pour her own wine. “I just—”

  “Nope,” Mitchell said, pointing the knife in her direction.

  “Fine,” Julie muttered. The second Mitchell’s back turned she looked at Emma and mouthed. “Later.”

  Emma rolled her eyes.

  Julie could talk about Cassidy until she went blue in the face.

  Didn’t mean Emma had to talk back.

  She was saved from any further interrogation by the noisy arrival of Riley and Sam, followed by Jake and Grace. Judging from Riley’s mussed hair and Grace’s smeared lip gloss, Emma had been spot-on about the reason for them being late.

  As Julie took everyone’s coats and fielded an argument between Riley and Grace about some Bachelor contestant drama, Emma moved up beside Sam Compton.

  “Your shirt’s untucked in the back,” she said quietly.

  He glanced down and gave her a sheepish smile. “Sorry. The cab ride—”

  Emma held up her hand. “I don’t even want to know.”

  He grinned and reached around to tuck his blue button-down shirt into his jeans. Not that it mattered. Shirt in, shirt out . . . either way, Sam Compton was a ridiculously good-looking bit of man meat.

  Hell, all the men in the room were almost painfully good-looking. Sam was blond and blue-eyed, with this bad-boy-meets-boy-next-door charm. Emma could hardly blame Riley for being obsessed with the guy since high school.

  Grace’s guy was equally appealing. Jake Malone was tall, dark, and handsome personified. He had a sort of Hugh Jackman–type confidence and copious amounts of charm with a wicked smile that promised deliciously dark deeds in the bedroom. Or so Grace told her.

  And then there was Mitchell Forbes. Sex in a pinstripe suit. Well, no pinstripes tonight. But the dark-haired, blue-eyed Wall Street hotshot had a buttoned-up seriousness that should have clashed with Julie’s carefree-party-girl vibe. Instead they were living proof that the whole opposites attract thing actually worked.

  Her friends had hit the relationship jackpot.

  If Emma weren’t so determined not to need a man, she’d be jealous.

  She was about to ask Sam how things were going with ROON—the distillery he’d established a couple years ago that had started to get national press in the past couple months—but Sam’s attention had drifted away from her.

  “Yo, Cassidy. Good to see you, man!”

  And so it begins.

  Emma turned to look at him, only because not looking at him, would be, well, obvious. And she made damn sure that there was no outward reaction to him. No knees buckling, no knuckles whitening from where she gripped her wine glass, not even a flicker of facial reaction.

  But inside?

  Inside something fluttered.

  Dangerously.

  There was no sign of the usual suit today. He was wearing jeans like the rest of the guys, and a black sweater that fit just well enough to emphasize sculpted shoulders and a trim waist. He held a bottle of wine in his left hand and shook Sam’s hand with his right. And his eyes . . .

  His eyes met hers over Sam’s shoulder. And held.

  And something shifted.

  It wasn’t much. Not even a smile. The glance wasn’t even prolonged.

  But for two people who had very deliberately tried to live outside of each other’s orbit for the past year, it was definitely something.

  Emma pressed her lips together as they both looked away.

  The moment had been so fleeting that nobody else seemed to have noticed.

  It was as though their spontaneous shared drinks a week earlier had been a turning point. Emma just didn’t know a turning point toward what.

  Or if she even wanted it.

  “I’d say you guys didn’t need to bring wine, but, of course, it’s always welcome,” Julie said, buzzing from person to person, kissing cheeks.

  “I brought dessert,” Riley said, holding up a box of cupcakes.

  “I told you I made dessert!” Julie said.

  “Right you did. I totally forgot,” R
iley said, exchanging a glance with Mitchell.

  Julie caught it and spun around to glare at her fiancé. “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her nothing,” Mitchell said. “No words were exchanged.”

  Julie’s eyes narrowed as Mitchell took a sip of wine. “I may have sent her a picture of your, um, cake.”

  “I baked,” Julie announced to everyone else with a happy nod.

  “That’s great, honey!” Grace replied. Then she turned her head toward Riley and spoke out of the corner of her mouth. “Good call on the cupcakes.”

  Julie pointed a finger. “Just for that, you have to try the first bite of my cake.”

  Julie was notoriously bad in the kitchen, probably because her efforts only ever pertained to special occasions, so she never got any regular practice.

  Mitchell, thankfully, had become increasingly handy in the kitchen since he and Julie had gotten together and it became clear that her skills were not destined for improvement. And since Mitchell Forbes excelled at everything he tried, dinner tonight would be passable, if not delicious. The man was gorgeous, smart, and successful, and he could cook. Basically perfect. Emma would not have been at all surprised to learn that Mitchell was packing pure gold parts in his pants.

  The group dissolved into small pockets of conversation: Julie, insisting Riley put the cupcakes out in the hallway, Sam talking to Grace about the new labels for his rye whisky, Mitchell pawning off hockey tickets he didn’t want onto Jake.

  Not for the first time, Emma felt an overwhelming surge of warmth and gratitude for this group of warm, bubbling friends, even if, at times, she still felt a little alone in the group, like she hadn’t quite found her place.

  She moved toward Julie and Mitchell’s plentiful wine collection and topped off her glass with something white and lovely.

  Cassidy came up behind her.

  She knew it was him by his smell. Which was creepy, when you thought about it, but sadly true.

  Over the years she’d done a good job of forgetting his face and the sound of his voice.

  She even liked to think she’d forgotten his touch, although sometimes her naughtier dreams told her otherwise.

  But she had never been able to forget the way Alex Cassidy smelled.

  Clean and spicy, and utterly masculine in the way that made even the most independent, girl-power woman want to press a cheek to his chest and just stay.

  “Think this is a setup?” Cassidy asked her, his voice low.

  She stepped aside so he could pour himself a glass of wine. Red. Back in college, and the years just after, he’d only ever drunk beer. But adult Cassidy . . . he drank red wine. Always. He even swirled and sniffed it before taking a sip, which should have been pretentious as hell, but instead made her think of a man who knew what he wanted, and wouldn’t waste his time on anything less.

  College Cassidy had been driven. Ambitious. Relentless.

  Adult Cassidy was all of those things. But he was also confident.

  Confident that what he wanted was always within reach.

  He lifted his eyebrows as he glanced at her, and she realized she hadn’t answered his question.

  “No, I don’t think it’s a setup,” she said, as they stood shoulder to shoulder, watching their friends. “Julie claims we’re both invited simply because it’s the first time in months that we’ve both been single.”

  “Is that so?” he said, taking another slow sip of his drink. “So I was with Danielle for two, maybe three months..”

  “Before that, I dated Doug—”

  “And I was with Alexa, maybe six months ago.”

  “Alex and Alexa? That’s cute,” she replied.

  “I dumped her because I thought the personalized towels would be too awkward when we got married.”

  “So true,” Emma agreed. “Although it must have made it handy during sex. That way, when you screamed your own name, she’d think, wrongly, that you were interested in her pleasure—”

  She broke off her sarcastic jab when she caught him watching her with an almost-smirk.

  “What?” she asked.

  His smile grew a little bigger, and he leaned in. “You think about us in bed.”

  Her mouth dropped, and he laughed outright. “You do. You think about the two of us together. How we were.”

  “I can assure you—”

  “Don’t bother denying it, Sinclair,” he said, clinking his glass to hers.

  She glared at his back as he moved toward the rest of the group, and he turned around at the last minute.

  “Emma.”

  “What?” Her voice was testy.

  “I think about it, too.”

  Well. Well. That . . . called for more wine.

  Except her glass was already full, so instead, she sighed and decided that there was a damn good reason they’d put up all that ice between them. Time to reinstall it before he made any more precarious trips down memory lane.

  She joined everyone at the kitchen counter, where they’d gathered around the appetizers like vultures.

  “Em, any update on your apartment?” Jake asked.

  “Nope, but it’s not my problem anymore,” Emma said, picking up an olive. “My renter’s insurance check is in the mail, and I gave notice to my landlord, so even if it is all fixed up, I won’t be moving back in. I was month to month anyway, so it was an easy out.”

  “Thank God,” Riley muttered. “Can you imagine the smell? Like rot and mildew and upstairs neighbor’s dirty water and mud—”

  “So what’s next?” Grace asked, ignoring Riley’s rant.

  Emma shrugged. “Camille’s not back for another two months, so I’ve got awhile to figure it out.”

  “You better not leave the Uppers,” Julie said. “I need solidarity up here in classy-town while these hip friends of ours hang out in the Village and Tribeca.”

  “Um, sorry, but whose lease in the Village did I take over?” Riley said tapping her lip. “Was that yours, Jules?”

  Julie changed the subject. “Hey, Cassidy, Mitchell has something to ask you,” she said in a loud voice, quieting all other conversation.

  Mitchell glared at her. “Not here I don’t.”

  “Yeah, of course here,” Julie chirped, tilting her head. “He can’t say no to you here.”

  “Oh, I absolutely can,” Cassidy said, raising his glass in Mitchell’s direction. “But you might as well get it over with. Is it about the triathlon we talked about, because I’m totally in—”

  “Shut it, Cassidy,” Riley said, stuffing a piece of baguette in his mouth. “Let Mitchell do the talking.”

  “Because he’s so good at that,” Jake said, earning the middle finger from his friend.

  Mitchell ran a hand over the back of his neck. “I, well, the thing is—”

  “Oh, I’ll do it,” Julie interrupted. “So, Cassidy, you know we get married in a few weeks. . . .”

  Cassidy slowly chewed the bread Riley had stuffed in his mouth before replying. “I am aware of this.”

  “Well, Mitchell here has, like, zero friends, because he’s antisocial.”

  “Introverted,” Mitchell ground out. “The word you’re looking for is introverted, and we introverts have small, selective circles of friends.”

  “Hear, hear,” Emma said.

  Mitchell winked at her.

  “Yeah, okay, whatever,” Julie said, waving this aside. “Anyway, one of the people in his ‘selective friend group’”—Julie put this last part in air quotes—“is this guy from college. Whose baby was just born.”

  “Oh, yay!” Grace said.

  “Well, yes. Yay. Except the wee one was four weeks premature, and while she’s just fine, she’ll need to be in the hospital for a while while her lungs develop. So no flying from California to New York on this family’s agenda. So . . .”

  Julie glanced between Mitchell and Cassidy and wiggled her eyebrows.

  Cassidy stared at her blankly. As did Jake and Sam. All four wome
n rolled their eyes at the sheer density of the male mind.

  “He wants you to be a groomsman, stupid,” Riley said. “Probably would have asked before if Emma hadn’t been a bridesmaid and the whole thing hadn’t smelled awkward back then.”

  “Oh, and it’s not awkward now?” Sam muttered.

  Julie glanced from Emma to Cassidy. “Well, we understand how things are now. And we know they’re not weird. Right?”

  Emma didn’t look at Cassidy. He didn’t look at her. But they answered in unison. “Right.”

  “So, Cassidy . . . you in?” Julie asked.

  Everyone looked at him. He grinned. “Hell, yes, I’m in.”

  Emma watched as Cassidy and Mitchell man-hugged and wondered how she felt about this little development.

  She, Grace, and Riley were all bridesmaids in the wedding. Actually, Grace was maid of honor, thanks to a rousing round of rock-paper-scissors. And Jake and Sam were groomsmen, thanks to the fast friendship that had formed among the men, as well as Mitchell’s otherwise limited friend group.

  Emma had never thought much about the fact that Cassidy hadn’t been asked before now. She knew that Mitchell was perhaps closer with Jake and Sam thanks to the “coupley” things they did with Grace and Riley.

  But she also knew that Cassidy and Mitchell were running buddies, had been to a couple Yankees games, and had the same sort of quiet alpha vibe going on.

  It made sense that he’d ask Cassidy, albeit a bit late in the game.

  But it also meant that she and Cassidy would be standing up at the altar.

  Together.

  Something they’d never done on their own wedding day.

  Emma swallowed.

  She could do this.

  She could stand next to her best friend on her special day without remembering that day.

  Couldn’t she?

  By the time everyone sat down to dinner, Emma had more or less pushed the thought out of her mind. Right up until the conversation came back to Julie’s wedding.

  “Cassidy, do you own a tux? Or do want me to set you up at the same place I made an appointment for Sam and Jake?” Julie asked.

  “I still can’t believe I have to wear a penguin suit,” Sam muttered around a piece of chicken.